This site is my way to share my views and general business and IT information with you about Microsoft, IT solutions for ISVs, technologists and businesses, large and small. I specialise in Windows Intune and SBS 2008.

Earlier this month on the IE blog there was some discussion about IE8, almost the 1st discussion about this - Internet Explorer 8. Now they talk about the "Standards Mode" and how for those who want near 100% standards based web sites can live happily together. It is worth saying that it might end up 100% standards based, but since I don't think such a thing exists, all I will say is that is passes all the standards tests. Acid is one of these tests. I strongly recommend you read the the whole blog

As a team, we’ve spent the last year heads down working hard on IE8. Last week, we achieved an important milestone that should interest web developers. IE8 now renders the “Acid2 Face” correctly in IE8 standards mode.

If you’re not a web developer, the details of this blog post probably aren’t all that interesting for you. I’d like you to know that we’re building IE8 for many different customers (consumers, web service providers, independent software vendors, enterprises, web developers, and others), and we’ll cover more details of the non-developer oriented work (e.g. user experience, reliability, security, etc.) in other posts in the future, after MIX.

While web developers will immediately recognize what Acid2 means, I want to step back and offer some context for other readers of this blog who may not be familiar with web standards. Briefly: Acid2 is one test of how modern browsers work with some specific features across several different web standards.

At first glance, this test seems simple. I think it actually offers a view into the subtle and complex world of web standards in a number of ways. Showing the Acid2 page correctly is a good indication of being standards compliant, but Acid2 itself isn’t a web standard or a web standards compliance test. The publisher of the test, the Web Standards Project, is an advocacy group, not a web standards defining body.

When we look at the long lists of standards (even from just one standards body, like the W3C), which standards are the most important for us to support? The web has many kinds of standards – true industry standards, like those from the W3C, de facto standards, unilateral standards, open standards, and more. Some standards like RSS or OpenSearch lack a formal standards body yet work pretty well today across multiple implementations. Many advances in web technologies, like the img tag, start out as unilateral extensions by a vendor. The X in AJAX, for example, has only started the formal standardization process relatively recently. As some comments have pointed out, CSS 2.1, one of the key standards that Acid2 exercises, is not “finalized” yet. Different individuals have differentopinions about different standards. The important thing about the Acid2 test is that it reflects what one particular group of smart people “consider most important for the future of the web.”

Comments

The reason (we) the developing public wants Microsoft to conform to the standards is so that the experience for the customer is uniform over the wast spectrum of methods we have no control over - their cell phone browser, office web browser, home browser, their entertainment center browser, Xbox, etc. The experience (interface) must render identically over those and developers already spend far too much time hacking css to make pages render correctly in Internet Explorer vs. everything else.

I hope they make the "standards" one a default. The reason most people I hang out with, esp in the web 2.0 bubble, design AWAY from Microsoft and ignore technologies like SilverLight is because of Microsoft long track of failed attempts of controlling the Internet - Hailstorm, Passport, ActiveX, etc all ring a very sour tone for some of us that got burned by them.

So now we don't trust Microsoft.

To be fair, for the past two years both the IIS, IE and Visual Studio groups have done more than I would ever expect from Microsoft in terms of designing what we asked for, open sourcing it all and making it cross platform, so we don't have to have special meetings about things that we can't support. So kudos to Microsoft on that, I think its a great direction that will eventually sway a lot of us back that are actively developing on LAMP only due to the huge community around it.